8/14/2019 Beirut 39 article

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ARTS & CULTURE Beirut 39

BEIRUT 39

BY PDRAIG BELTON

For this year alone, there is to be an Arab Booker. Hay-on-Wye- thatmuddy annual bibliophile saturnalia in Wales which ormer PresidentClinton once amously termed a Woodstock o the mind - was knownalready or its international collaborations. Now in its 21st year, theHay Festival has spawned sister estivals in the Alhambra, Nairobi,Cartagena and Belast.

It goes now to Beirut. Beirut, or this year, reigns as World BookCapital, and a short list o 39 Arab writers o 39 years or younger

is the centrepiece o Beirut 39, Hay's frst Arab collaboration. The39 include 24 novelists, and 15 poets; only 16 are at the momentpublished outside the Arab world. O the shortlist, organiser CristinaFuentes La Roche says, 'whilst we are amiliar with second genera-tion diaspora writers who have emigrated to the West, we've beenslow, until now, in fnding illuminating voices rom the Arab worldand celebrating them. What's thrilling or us at Hay is that the Beirut39 judges are leaping over the writers already known in English andFrench, and fnding undiscovered genius all over the place.'

For Hay, this is ollowing on the heels o Bogot 39, which marked aColumbian sojourn in 2007 or Unesco's book capital. It grows alsorom its Andalusian estival, Hay Festival Alhambra, which in 2008and 2009 made use o the Nasrid palace as a site or Arab-Europeanliterary mingling. Miss Fuentes says, 'the best way to deepen yourunderstanding o a culture is through its writers.' For the 39 on theshortlist, there were roughly 450 submissions.

One is Mohammed Hasan Alwan, a Saudi author born in 1979 andauthor o three novels, presently at work on the ourth. Critics havedescribed him as an expressionist who endows inanimate objectswith the power o speech, and uses metaphor in ways new to modernArabic writing. His novels Saq al-Keaya (Ceiling o Sufciency),Sofa and Touq al-Taharah (The Collar o Purity) - explore love in SaudiArabia, and the implications o heartbreak. His frst novel begins withthe words, 'You were not an ordinary woman or my love to you to bejust another ordinary love.'

Alwan points to the accessibility, new to his generation o young Arabwriters, o literature and knowledge rom all quarters o the world. 'Notanymore are writers limited to whats been oered in their geographi-cal, political, and cultural boundaries,' he says. 'In a recent WritersRetreat, a ew Arab writers and I agreed that despite the act each ous came rom a dierent background, we all have Facebook accounts,most o us speak a second language, and we all read the same booksand share a similar universal liestyle. Each one o us knows some-thing about each others backgrounds and cultures.'

Manar Makhool, a Palestinian doctoral candidate at the University oCambridge, sees young Arab writing as growing more proessional,with plots that have become more complex and developed, andnovels which have tended to be longer as well. The addressing opolitical issues is, in his view, becoming 'more subtle and Bakhtinianin its discourse.'

Pursuing the young Arab writer o today, and how he or she diersrom writers emerging in earlier moments, or one the rising genera-tion eels a reedom to be non-ideological - says Dr Otared Haidar,editor o the journal Mokarabat and an academic at Oxord withoutthe compulsion elt by his or her antecedents to side with nationalistor letist partisan camps. The plane o literature seems more de-tached rom the plane o politics at the moment, the writer's role lessinterwoven with that o public intellectual and political consciencethan at the time o Salih, say, or Kanaani. The younger generation,says, Haidar, 'can be thinkers and intelligentsia without eeling thisneed to be under the umbrella o an ideology.'

A second trait o the emerging Facebooked generation o Arab writ-ers is their sense o urge and need to integrate into world literature,and as well as participation in pries, and pursuit o translation intoWestern languages. Translation o world literature into Arabic is vast;trafc in the reciprocal direction is sparse. Contrast this with the writ-erly model o Syrian short story writer zakaria Tamer, now 78. Tamer,a pioneer o magic realism within the Arabic short story (and latterlya resident o Great Britain), is chased by publishers and translatorsbut reluctant to give readings, to ollow what is written about him, oreven to improve his English. Says Haidar, 'he is a genius, but he justwants to write, in Arabic.'

It remains to be seen whether, or young writers o the moment, Iraqlooms as large in the imaginary as Palestine, or whether it is ulti-

mately a sad but more episodic, limited event. The Beirut 39 long-listincluded one novel by a 25-year old Saudi, Nisreen Ghandourah;called al-Nahr al-Thalith (The Third River being, ater the Tigrisand Euphrates, the river o tears, but tears which are water andthereore lie), it eatured a proessor o history hallucinating Iraqas Ishtar, queen o love, ertility and war, amidst her descent intoHades. Has Iraq been a prism or reocusing the relationship with aWest which oers both literary models and broader audiences, butalso is one characterised by postcolonialism and, at times, occupa-tion? It is too early to determine. Says Makhool, 'Trends in novelstend to take longer times to ormulate and stabilise. I think there is ahigher chance that Iraq becomes a co-Palestine and not a secondPalestine.'

The search within the Arab novel or, perhaps, the next TayyebSaleh, or Abd al-Rahman Muni runs today through Beirut, with anattentive Welsh audience as well. The crowning event o the estivalwill be held in Beirut rom the 15th to 18th o April 2010, to markthe end o the city's reign as World Book Capital. Bloomsbury andBloomsbury Qatar will in the end publish an anthology o the youngwriters in English and Arabic. Miss Fuentes perceives though alonger commitment to the writers o the 39, one not only o identi-ying but also o nurturing an emerging generation: 'Over the nextten years,' she promises, 'we will work with them to promote theirwriting around the world.'